New Exhibition at the Reid Hall Caféothèque Featuring Marie-Noëlle Fontan

The Caféothèque is open to Reid Hall cardholders Monday through Thursday from 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Exhibition text
by Christina Chirouze Montenegro

Marie-Noëlle Fontan’s feet have walked upon the grasses of the world: she has dedicated her life to traversing the Earth’s diversity, contemplating its landscapes, and observing them actively. Touching them. Carefully selecting, from among the abundance of leaves, flowers, stems, buds, and branches they offer, a collection guided by color, form, and dialogue. Where a botanist might see a fungus, a farmer a threat to their crops, she perceives an abstract drawing, a palette of colors, but above all, a unique expression of life. And this life, she views with tenderness, gathering it with great delicacy.

Then follows a process of preservation: leaves are dried between the pages of notebooks, pods are stored in makeshift cases. These objects, removed from their original ecosystems, often travel thousands of kilometers before being meticulously placed in cabinets—personal cabinets of curiosity, where Marie-Noëlle keeps her treasures.

One day, these fragments of nature—once rooted, then globe-trotters—see the light again. And a new page of their story begins. Placed in the loom of their explorer, they meet a needle, engage in dialogue with threads of cotton or brass, intertwine with their fellow travelers, and encounter other species, as hands gently guide them, offering them a new language. These branches, leaves, and flowers also guide the artist: from their shapes she draws fastenings, from their colors, allure. Thus, through this long collaboration between geography, vegetation, Marie-Noëlle’s gaze and hand, new landscapes are born. With the complicity of their discoverer, these migrant plants recount the past and the elsewhere: Marie-Noëlle interweaves sister plants, reuniting those that once shared a home. They retain the memory of lands that have since been altered, deforested, polluted, or replanted. Through beauty, they carry hope.

While reading Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman’s masterpiece, Marie-Noëlle and I were moved by this line: “tenderly will I use you curling grass.” For me, it perfectly captures the artist’s affectionate approach to her fibers and her craft. The weaver’s thread, the poet’s verse: a lifelong endeavor—unique, total, constant, and devoted—a flow of words, an infinite Path, a tribute to the Earth. With the woman weaver, other figures come to mind: Penelope, Arachne, or Ixchel, the Mayan goddess of textile art and medicine. But it is more evident, simpler, more universal: Marie-Noëlle and her woven gardens sing together an ode to slowness, to an eternal gaze upon beauty, and to the contemplation of life.

Artist bio

Marie-Noëlle Fontan developed a passion for weaving early on, and as a teenager, she began learning its techniques by herself. For her studies, she chose to pursue a degree in Art History (at Toulouse – Le Mirail), while continuing to nurture her first love: weaving.

In the 1980s, she set out to travel to Guatemala to study the techniques of Maya weaving. Alongside, she studied Guatemalan textile collections at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris and the Ixchel Museum (Guatemala City), but most importantly, she conducted hands-on fieldwork in Guatemala with master weavers. Her artistic work began to emerge in the 1990s, a period during which she started to weave her “Chemin”—a project that has grown over time and through her stays in various countries (Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, but also Australia, Bangladesh...). This “Chemin”, a tangible symbol of Marie-Noëlle Fontan’s artistic journey, now measures nearly 50 meters and includes plant species from all five continents.

Her textile work has been exhibited around the world, in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including a major retrospective at the Centro Cultural de España in Antigua Guatemala in 2023. Other highlights include her participation in the Textile Art Triennial in Slovakia (also exhibited in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland), the 4th Kogei Triennale in Kanazawa, Japan, and shows in Italy, Spain, Argentina, the United States, Guatemala... In Paris, her work is regularly shown at Galerie Papiers d’Art in the Marais district.